Author Identification of Old Literary Texts Based on Syntactic Structures (Case Study: Tadhkirat al-Awliya)

In old Persian literature، there are works which due to the oldness and existence of several versions، it is necessary for the original version to be specified. Since these works are a means of transferring knowledge and culture، designation of their original version will attain special significance. In usual methods، decisions about original version are made through the comparison of several versions (codicology) and also the study of the style of the works (stylistics). These methods take into account linguistic factors including structural، stylistic، semantic، and handwriting as well as historical factors. In recent decades، new quantitative methods which concentrate just on linguistic factors were created. Furthermore، the use of these methods will make decisions making free from personal views and interpretations. This study employs a quantitative method for author identification of appendices of Tadhkirat al-Awliya، for which there are doubts concerning their attribution to Attar. In this study، syntactic structures of two parts، the original one and the doubtful one (Molhaghat)، were extracted; then their frequencies were compared and analyzed through chi-square statistics. Based on the results، these parts ie. Molhaghat cannot be attributed to Attar.